Organizing Christmas Decorations

A new year usually makes us think about planning and organizing. Now that Christmas is over, we’ve been making a huge effort to get organized, both personally and professionally. Rather than waiting for the new year to get started, we spent the week after Christmas working on a few projects we’ll be sharing more about. With the holiday season coming to a close, we decided to focus first on organizing and cleaning up our Christmas decorations! Glitter, pine needles, and tissue paper everywhere!

Living in the city, space is at a premium. Our laundry room (really, laundry closet) is typically stacked with a mishmash of storage boxes. We realized this year that our Christmas decorations we’ve collected over the years have been stored in the same old cardboard boxes (and in many cases, same ten-year old tissue paper) for as long as we can remember. While it’s actually a traditional process for us to pull out all of the boxes and unwrap the precious ornaments, this year, we decided to consolidate and organize them to save space.

We recycled all of our old boxes and traded them in for these stackable plastic ornament organizing containers. Not only do they store the ornaments in a much smaller amount of space, but they also have dividers to protect the ornaments. You can adjust the dividers for long or short ornaments to suit your needs.

We also love this Christmas light organizing box. (There are only a few of the ones we ordered left on Amazon.) Each year we pull the lights out, we have to test them and de-tangle them. Not anymore! As part of our cleaning process, we tested all the lights and threw away any that no longer worked. Then we rolled them around the neat frames that come with the storage box, so there will be no de-tangling needed next year. If you have rolls of wrapping paper floating around your house, you may want to consider something like this or this to keep them organized and in one place.

Not only did we notice that our new Christmas storage setup takes up way less space (6-8 old cardboard boxes now down to 3), but it will also be so much easier going forward. We’ll of course miss opening each ornament like a little present every year, but an organized space is worth it. Plus we can rest easy (with them actually under our bed now), knowing that they’re safely stored in sturdy boxes that won’t topple over in an earthquake like we had this week!